We Need to Talk About Kevin
This book is one of the most difficult reads I've ever experienced. Not in the sense that it was actually challenging to read, but it was sometimes physically painful to keep reading, knowing that there was no way for a happy ending.
This book, by Lionel Shriver, is the story of the mother of a school shooter. It is written as letters from Eva, the mother, to her estranged husband Franklin, as a retrospective on Kevin's life after the shooting. It is set up so you know exactly where things are going from the beginning, although it starts with a few painful details and becomes more fleshed out over the course of the story.
What makes this book so unbelieveable is how brutally believeable it is. It's hard to imagine how Lionel Shriver got so inside the head of this mother when you'd think it's the last thing you'd ever want to imagine.
I have now read this book twice, once over a year ago, once just a few weeks ago. The first time I read it, I literally read the last hundred pages through my fingers, barely able to force myself to keep reading while simultaneously unable to stop. The second time, I was expecting to find it a slightly less stressful read, given that I knew what happened. But it was almost worse a second time through - anticipating exactly what was going to happen, waiting for the painful other shoe to drop.
This book will haunt you and stay with you, but it is undeniably an outstanding book that will probably make you second-guess your decision to have children if you already have them or make you question if you ever want them if you don't. I am forcing my book club to read this in January (sorry, guys), but I am really looking forward to the discussion because I think this is a book that needs to be talked about.
Everyone Worth Knowing
This book is by Lauren Weisberger, the author of
The Devil Wears Prada, which I hated. You might ask yourself why I read this if I hated her first book, but I'm sort of masochistic like that sometimes. So many people loved Devil that I figured I should give her another shot.
Yeah, I hated this one too.
Fortunately, it appears that I am not alone in this opinion. Googling it brought me a delightful review
titled, rather excellently, "Everyone Worth Knowing not worth reading". The New York Times Book Review called it a "fatuous, clunky second novel."
It's always nice when you feel a little vindicated about a book you hated.
It's basically the same gist as Devil - girl gets new job where she's totally out of her league, girl is annoyingly good at it while simultaneously believing herself far better than the others she works with, girl pretends to be just a regular gal despite the fact that her supposedly dull and cheap wardrobe is more expensive than any wardrobe of anyone I know. It's virtually impossible to have any sympathy for Bette, and her treatment of her friends is enough to make me really dislike her. The romance novel obsession was supposed to make her cute and likeable, but all it succeeeded in doing was making her seem even more vacuous than she already was.
Don't bother.
The People of Sparks
This is the sequel to
City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau, which was a YRCA book this year. I enjoyed the sequel, although not as much as I enjoyed the first book. It's the story of a colony of people from the City of Ember, an underground city, who escape from their dying city to emerge out into the light. It's an interesting concept, and one that works well for most of the story. There are elements of it that are less interesting, and overall the concept is not nearly as tight as it was in the first book. Still, it was a good read, and I'll read her next book. (Which, according to her website, will be related to the first two but not directly, which sounds like the concept that Lois Lowry used for her
Giver follow-ups.) When I was a kid, I always enjoyed these post-apocalyptic stories, like
Z is for Zachariah, one I was very fond of. These two books have one of the more interesting concepts of that world, and I found it to be a solidly created world, something that often falls apart in this kind of story.
So, overall, a good one.
The Girls
Right, hi. I have a booklog. Sorry about that, booklog.
I haven't been reading much in the way of new stuff lately. I reread HP4 after I saw the movie, and then wanted to reread 5, and I'll probably reread 6 after I'm done 5, because I'm anal like that. I'm rereading
East right now, because my YA book group is reading it for the December meeting. I just finished rereading
We Need to Talk About Kevin, because I am evil and I am making my regular book group read it in January. But that book needs its own entry.
But I have read a few things.
One of them was
The Girls, by Lori Lansens. This is the fictional autobiography of conjoined twins. I picked it up when somebody checked it out at work, and I immediately put it on hold, because I am somewhat of a sucker for gimmicky books like that.
I really have no idea how fair or accurate this depiction of life as a conjoined twin. I'm going to blithely assume that she did her research, and even if it's innaccurate it seems like a convincing portrayal, which is really all I ask for in a book. It's a Canadian book, but didn't really feel like one, which is generally a compliment coming from me as I'm not known to be wild about a lot of Canadian fiction.
This book had an absolutely killer opening, and the entire story was compelling from start to finish. There was one plot point running through most of the book that I wasn't entirely wild about, but overall I found it really well-written, and made me both interested in and sympathetic to the totally unimaginable lifestyle of the sisters. It was a complicated concept that was immensely well executed, and this is a book that I'd recommend to many of my friends and may well buy for my stepmother-in-law for Christmas.
I shall leave you with the opening to the book, since it's pretty irresistable.
I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or solo walk. I’ve never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved. And, if such things were to be, I’d live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially.
